Ken McClure: Tangled Web

Gordon was ushered in to a room facing the back of the house where he found Lucy sitting on a couch with her shoulders hunched and her arms folded tightly. A box of Kleenex tissues sat at her side and an untouched cup of tea lay on the table in front of her. She was staring at it distantly rather than drinking it. She looked up when she heard him come in and he saw the pain in her red-rimmed eyes.

‘Lucy, I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am,’ said Gordon. ‘This is an absolute nightmare.’

‘The whole world’s gone mad, Tom,’ said Lucy in a low voice. ‘I just don’t know what’s happening any more. One moment we were building a snowman in the garden and the next our life is in ruins.’

Gordon was alarmed at how frail Lucy appeared. Her normal air of self-confidence had disappeared and her body language of crossed arms and bowed head suggested defeat. Her blonde hair hung limply about her face and her cheeks seemed pale and drawn. He sat down beside her, placing his bag at his feet and putting his arm round her shoulders. ‘Quite unbelievable,’ he said.

‘John didn’t kill Anne-Marie, you must know that,’ said Lucy.

‘Of course,’ said Gordon, ‘but for whatever reason, he’s made a confession and that’s going to make things difficult. I just don’t understand. Have you any idea what made him do it?’

‘Lucy leaned forward and looked resolutely at the floor, still cradling her head with both hands. She had difficulty getting the words out, but in the end she said, ‘He must think I did it.’

Gordon let a few moments go by before asking softly, ‘Why should he think that, Lucy?’

Lucy considered for a moment in silence before saying. ‘Sometimes I get low; I get depressed. I try to be positive like John but it’s not always easy: I’m not as strong as he is. He’s a natural optimist and I’m not. I see the black side of things all too clearly. I hadn’t been feeling too well the day before it happened; I was very low. John must think I killed Anne-Marie while he was out in the garden working on the snowman.’

‘But you didn’t?’

‘No, of course not!’ said Lucy decisively. ‘As I said, I do get depressed and I did have moments of despair when I couldn’t see a future for her and thought — maybe even said, that she’d be better off dead — but I never really meant it. I loved her; I loved her very much. You have to believe that! Oh Tom, what kind of a person would do something like this?’

Gordon shook his head and said, ‘I don’t know, Lucy. That’s what we, or rather the police, have to find out.’

‘Have you seen John?’

‘They wouldn’t let me. They’re holding him at Caernarfon: he’ll appear in court on Monday morning.’

‘I want to be there,’ said Lucy, becoming animated. ‘I have to tell them that he’s lying; that he’s just trying to protect me. John couldn’t kill anyone. He even opens the windows to let out flies.’

‘I don’t think going up to court’s a very good idea,’ said Gordon. ‘That would be the wrong way to go about things. It’s really the police we have to convince in the first instance and then, when John realises that you had nothing to do with Anne-Marie’s death, he can retract his confession and the police can begin a proper investigation. Just as a matter of interest, what were you doing while John was outside building the snowman?’

‘I put Anne-Marie down for a sleep and than I went upstairs to look through the wardrobes for clothes for Captain Mainwaring.’

‘Cap...?’

‘Captain Mainwaring — the snowman John built.’

‘How long did that take you?’

‘Twenty minutes or so.’

‘Twenty minutes?’ repeated Gordon, unable to disguise the element of surprise in his voice and making it sound like a question.

‘I got side-tracked,’ said Lucy. ‘I’d been having a good rake and found things in the wardrobe that I hadn’t seen for years. I tried some of them on just to see if I could still get into them. John was happy in the garden — I could hear him whistling and Anne-Marie was sleeping so... it was fun. A trip down Memory Lane if you like.’

Lucy construed Gordon’s ensuing silence as an accusation. He was in fact wondering how the police would view the twenty-minute period while she was in the house alone with the baby while John was out in the garden.

‘I didn’t do it,’ insisted Lucy. ‘Oh God, this is all just too awful to bear.’ She broke down in tears and Gina did her best to soothe her.

‘I believe you, Lucy’ said Gordon. ‘But we have to be honest with each other; I have to know everything if I’m to be able to help. That’s why I have to ask you if you were still having one of your low spells on the day Anne-Marie disappeared. Were you depressed on that day, Lucy?’

‘No,’ insisted Lucy. ‘Like I told you, I ‘d been a bit down the day before but I was definitely coming out of it and John was cheering me up with talk of the fun we were going to have when the weather got better. We were going to take Anne-Marie to the beach, the zoo... all sorts of things...’

Gordon nodded then opened up his bag. ‘I’m going to give you something to help you sleep,’ he said. ‘You must get some rest. You’ll be no good to John or anyone if you’re completely exhausted.’

He gave Lucy a sedative and watched her take it before Gina escorted her off to bed.

‘Tea?’ asked Gina when she came back.

‘Please.’

‘What’s going to happen?’ Gina asked as she returned from the kitchen with a tea tray and laid it down on the coffee-table.

Gordon looked at her and saw that her expression had become troubled. She’d been masking it well in Lucy’s presence but now the worry was all too evident.

‘I’m not sure,’ he replied honestly. ‘The real problem is the confession. It’s stopping the police from even looking for anyone else and frankly I think they’ll be quite happy about that because if John and Lucy didn’t do it, it’s not easy to imagine who did. And what was their motive in taking the body back to bury it in the garden?’

‘That’s more or less what my husband was saying,’ confided Gina uneasily. ‘I think he thinks...’ Her voice trailed off.

‘What does he think?’ prompted Gordon quietly.

‘That Lucy did it,’ said Gina. She got the words out quickly as if they were unpleasant medicine she didn’t want to have in her mouth.

‘What makes him think that?’

‘Like you say, the fact that he simply couldn’t imagine who else would have done it and also because he remembers what Lucy was like just after Anne-Marie was born, when she didn’t want to know about the baby’s problems and insisted the nurses take her away. Men don’t understand post-natal depression: I had it myself after Luke was born. It’s an illness but you can’t explain that to outsiders. They think that’s the way you really are but you’re not, it’s the illness talking. Lucy got over it just like I did. True, she got a bit down from time to time — who wouldn’t in the circumstances, but she loved Anne-Marie. We all did.’

‘Good, you obviously don’t believe she’s capable of having killed her either,’ said Gordon.

‘No,’ agreed Gina. ‘Nothing would make her do something like that.’

‘But that still leaves the problem of who did and why?’ said Gordon.

Gordon managed to get a meeting with Chief Inspector Davies at ten the following morning: he told him his thoughts about the Palmers. To his surprise and annoyance, Davies seemed singularly unimpressed. He listened throughout with a cynical smile playing round the corners of his mouth. It was almost as if he’d heard it all before. When Gordon had finished he asked, ‘In the great scheme of things Doctor, does it really matter?’